In the Berkshires, a Dance Destination Marks an Anniversary by Stretching

By GIA KOURLAS

Published: June 28, 2007

When Ted Shawn happened upon Jacob's Pillow in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts in 1930, he didn't have a grand scheme in mind. He simply pined for a retreat or, as Norton Owen, the Pillow's director of preservation, put it, a place ''to get away from it all.''

His dream of solitude didn't last long. After Shawn bought the property in 1931, he converted a barn into a dance studio, and two years later his private sanctuary became the base of Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers. Since then Jacob's Pillow, now directed by Ella Baff, has come a long way: This summer the festival, on a former station along the Underground Railroad in Becket, Mass., celebrates its 75th anniversary.

After a rocky period in the 1990s when the Pillow was near foreclosure, it has had a resurgence. Under Ms. Baff in the last 10 years, the institution has experienced a 38 percent increase in ticket sales, with a 77 percent increase in attendance at all events offered, including discussions, free performances, exhibitions and talks. Even more indicative of the organization's financial health is its first endowment campaign. The goal for its first phase, which ended in June, was $6 million; $6.1 million was raised.

But while the Pillow is thriving, its programming tends to lean toward the safe. Top billing is generally reserved for established names in dance. This season, along with choreographers like Paul Taylor and Mark Morris, the festival includes a season by the ballet star Rasta Thomas in a program called ''Bad Boys of Dance,'' which would seem to refer to Shawn's lifelong crusade: making dance a legitimate career for American men.

That ambition, inadvertently perhaps, transformed Jacob's Pillow into a destination for dance. For 75 cents Shawn offered lecture-demonstrations to the public, which also included tea, a practice that continued into the 1950s.

''Once you get past the 'O.K., I want to be here on the hilltop where nobody will bother me,' what he was doing when he started to give performances was to begin to draw back the veil a little bit,'' Mr. Owen explained recently in a telephone interview. ''He was really trying to educate people, to expose people and to engage people in appreciating dance in the way that he did.''

This week Coleman Lemieux & Compagnie from Canada presents ''The Dome,'' Shawn's suite of dances set to Bach that was last seen in its final form in 1940. The company's artistic directors, Bill Coleman and Laurence Lemieux, intrigued by a photograph of the work that they saw during their residency at the Pillow this spring, decided to restage it using children of company members who are dance students.

The directors ''found it charming and revelatory in a lot of ways,'' Mr. Owen said. ''It can be seen as a simplistic reading of the music in visual terms, but there was also a kind of simplicity about it that made them think of children.''

The anniversary season, which stretches boundaries more than most at the Pillow, offers more than 100 shows, 40 of them free as part of the Inside/Out series, programmed by Ms. Baff, Ginger Gascon Menard and Barbara Bryan. Included are United States debuts by Mimulus of Brazil, Ballet du Grand Th?re de Gen? and the Henri Oguike Dance Company from England.

''I try to present the whole of dance, in a way, and I'm not saying that I include everything all the time, but I don't really subscribe to a certain kind of work,'' Ms. Baff said in a phone interview. ''Most presenting organizations or festivals are fairly specifically defined, so it may be about contemporary work or only traditional work, but there are very few places where it's about the art form of dance. That's just a different way of seeing it. I think that being broader is a very good thing.''

Ms. Bryan, who is also the executive director of Movement Research, a New York organization dedicated to experimental work and artistic process, has stuck with the Pillow even though much of the work presented there lies outside her primary aesthetic interests. ''That challenges me,'' she said. ''But I think more than anything the Pillow serves as a way to engage audiences in dance. That's the primary mission.''

And in that sense little has changed since Shawn's day, when programs were an eclectic mixture of ethnic dance, ballet and modern works, enriched by curtain speeches full of context. Today exhibitions and lectures, as well as daily talks by scholars in residence like Suzanne Carbonneau, provide rich historical background.

''We have people who have been seeing dance all their lives, but you will always find somebody who might be at the Pillow for the first time,'' Mr. Owen said. ''It may even be their very first dance performance. That's a stunning opportunity: to have the chance to show people something that's not going to make them say: 'O.K., I've seen dance now, and it confirms everything I ever believed. I don't like it.' ''

Mr. Owen said he sees a connection between Shawn's method of ''getting people on his side'' and then challenging them, and the way the Pillow operates today. ''We don't poke the eyes of the viewer,'' he said. ''And equally important to what's on the stage is the enclosure that it's in. Something about the experience of watching dance is richer on a beautiful summer evening. It's very different than getting on a subway and running into a theater at the last minute.''

The Ted Shawn Theater at Jacob's Pillow, the dance festival in Becket, Mass., intended as a retreat but now a destination for dance. (Photograph by Julia Zhou); Photo (Photograph by John Lindquist/Harvard Theater Collection, via Jacob's Pillow); Above, Nino Gogua, left, and Lasha Khozashvili of the State Ballet of Georgia performing this year; Ted Shawn's Men Dancers about 1940. (Photograph by Nancy Palmieri for The New York Times)